Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Dear Conservative Party of Canada: Immigrants Don't Vote For You.

I came across this blog post about Canada's erstwhile Minister of Immigration Jason Kenney and learned an interesting fact about the CPC's alleged gains among immigrant voters in the federal election of 2011 where the party secured its majority.

It turns out the seats they won in the nation's urban areas - particularly Toronto which has a high immigrant and non-white electorate - were won not on newly acquired votes from immigrants but on vote splitting between Canada's two left of center parties, the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party. It appears "new Canadians" who supported the LPC in previous elections just shifted their vote to the NDP in 2011. This allowed the CPC to win those seats where the shift was significant enough to allow them to waltz right up the middle of a split vote.

Looks like immigrants aren't the friends of the CPC after all despite all the efforts made to buy their support with reckless promises of faster, laxer, and more open immigration. Why should they support the CPC at all when the LPC and the NDP are promising immigrants the same gifts and more if need be?

This is a problem the Conservatives have to acknowledge and it's one they partially brought upon themselves. While the Pierre Trudeau Liberals are often blamed for cynically manipulating the immigration system for party advantage it was Brain Mulroney and the then Progressive Conservative Party of Canada that let the system really get out of control. Also, when the CPC was in power they imported record numbers of immigrants even in a time of economic downturn thinking they could beat the Liberals at their own game when all they really accomplished was inflate the support base of their political rivals by importing future LPC and NDP voters. Way to go morons!

The Conservatives need to start acting like conservatives which means adopting a conservative approach to immigration because pandering to the immigrant/ethnic vote bloc doesn't and didn't work. If they did they would nicely align themselves with the wishes of most Canadians. Besides, there is something very undemocratic and unnerving that a minority, foreign born portion of the population has so much influence over a policy that can vastly alter the future demographic makeup of the country. We need a party that listens to the majority, not another one that ignores them to pander to the minority.